


Heaven Is Full

by truebeasts



Category: Worm - Wildbow
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-19
Updated: 2015-02-19
Packaged: 2018-03-13 19:15:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3393089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/truebeasts/pseuds/truebeasts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ciara's trying to be a hero, but she can't quite reconcile herself with her ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heaven Is Full

Below her, the street boiled with flame, vague figures weaving in and out of curtains of smoke.  It was a fight between villains, but she identified them more by their shadows than by their costumes. Twisted forms, all, dissolving and reforming as each passenger drew on its power, each radiant to her other sight, clear through the haze of burning tires and trash. They hadn’t seen her yet, perched as she was on the rooftop.

She spread her tinker-made wings to their full extent and chose her spirits. The ondine, whose power would dampen the flames that were even now beginning to lick at the buildings on either side of the street.  The mother of winter, whose aura sapped strength from those she touched to increase her own. The boy beside her on the rooftop shifted as she settled her shield on her arm.

“Are you ready?” she asked

“Ready.” His voice was clipped.

“If you take my hand, I’ll carry you down.”

He nodded, wordlessly, and stretched out a hand to her.  She could see the patterns that moved under and behind his flesh, like knotwork.  A face that was both young and old, and behind that, a second face, carved of stone. The hanged man.

As she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, she reminded herself that that wasn’t his name.

And with her wings spread, Valkyrie pushed off the rooftop and took flight.

The villains scattered when they saw her coming—or tried too. Her power was already working on them, drawing them into inertia, leaving them panting as they tried to run. She set her partner down, and he shot a web of filaments from the spools at his wrists that became rigid tripwires as he froze them in place.  Valkyrie was back in the air already, putting out fires, herding the runners back into the center of the street as they tried to disperse.

Her partner ducked under one villain’s guard, and as soon as he touched her costume, she was frozen in place, twisting her head helplessly as if she could get out of her time-stopped clothes.  But the pyrokinetic—to Valkyrie’s eyes, he was a figure made of cracked and blackened wood that smoked and glowed like a banked fire—was already charging towards him, ready to catch him in a sheet of flame. 

She reached out across the connection she shared with her spirits to guide the hanged man’s steps.  He darted backwards easily, as if the movement was his own, and she descended between them, using the ondine’s power to extinguish the flames before her.  The pyrokinetic slumped to his knees under the influence of the mother of winter’s aura, his flames dulling.  She took flight again to round up the third fighter, who was limping away on a burned leg.  He didn’t try to run when she changed the ondine’s ghost for the dreamer and cast him into sleep.

Two others had already fled.  She lighted on the ground and mantled her wings.  She wouldn’t pursue them.  Not today.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

It was her partner’s voice, and when she looked back at him she made the effort to see his flesh-and-blood face, half-hidden by the domino mask he wore. He had his phone out. She knew his old costume had covered his entire face.

“I’m calling in the trucks, now that you’ve doused the fires,” he went on. “We should start securing them before you power wears off.”

Valkyrie opened her mouth.  “You were going to get burned.”

“Yeah, I realize that.”  He shook his head, handcuffing the comatose pyrokinetic’s hands behind his back. “I’m just, you know, reminding you that I asked you not to.”

White bodysuit outfitted with armored gauntlets and reflective panels. Red hair.  Freckles on his hands.  Flesh and blood.  That was him. Not the other face that she saw, the ageless one whose features were limned as if with lichen.

Valkyrie took a breath.

“I didn’t think you wanted me to let you get injured.”

Besides that, anything that put him in the hospital would create other problems.

He smiled, but it was a tight smile, his laugh not really a laugh. Just a little puff of breath.

“Well, now you know.”  He turned away from her as the Warden’s vans pulled into the alley, unpowered officers carrying canisters of container foam.  They were easier to look at, in some ways, without the insistent presence of their passengers pressing out from behind them, but if she looked too long they shied away from her, and she had to bite back the reminder that she’d only ever targeted parahumans.  Any civilians she’d killed had been, more or less, accidents. 

Although, on balance, there were probably one or two who had insulted her. She couldn’t always remember the details.

She adjusted the panels of chain that bordered her blue skirt, smoothing them until all of the links hung straight.  It wasn’t the sort of statement that people found reassuring.

“Okay, Dennis,” she said.  She knew she’d waited too long, broken the flow of the conversation, but she said it anyway. Because she needed to practice thinking about him using his name.

After their patrol was over, Valkyrie waited outside in the hallway of the Warden’s base while he changed into his civilian clothes.  The door was just slightly ajar, and she could hear the sounds of his footsteps on the other side of it.  She could feel, also, the tensing of their connection as he moved away from her, the way it relaxed when he came closer.  Like a tension headache beginning at the back of her neck and moving up her scalp.  The more she thought about it, the more her power itched.

She sank down until she was sitting on the floor, drawing her wings around her. The wings were the part of the costume that she liked best.  Swan-white, the feathers warm and pliant under her fingers.  A cape passed down the hallway, half-nodding at her as he passed. She thought that she should know his name, but she wasn’t, in point of fact, very good with names. But his spirit was familiar—muscled, snakelike, a coiled spring that could unwind at any moment. It grinned at her with a human face. Human-like, anyway.

She waited until he’d turned the corner before she summoned her warriors. Eidolon, the high priest. Alexandria, the idol.

She found herself gravitating more and more towards the ones who’d died at the end. Facing Scion.  It was comforting to have them flanking her, silently present, but she saw how the heroes flinched when they saw the shadows that of those that they’d known, before.  So she chose her older ghosts, in public, when she could.  It made people more comfortable, even as it reminded her of the past, and of who she’d been.

She rested her chin on her knees and watched Eidolon, surrounded by a nimbus of green light.  He carried his hands held out before him, as if he was searching for something in the midst of darkness.

Poor priest, she thought.  He’d killed more than her, in the end.

It was almost comforting, in its way.

She felt Dennis coming towards her before he opened the door.  She dismissed her other warriors.

“Are you changing?”  He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, looking down at her.

“I’d rather keep my wings on.” 

She reminded herself to keep her sentences simple.  Declarative statements.  That was what was safest.  Anything longer and she’d start to slip into the wrong metaphors, the wrong tone of voice.

“I saw that, by the way.”  His mouth was twisted up at the corners, half curiosity and half—something else.

She glanced up at him.  He looked about the same age as her, freckled, his red hair uncombed.  But the age that she looked wasn’t her real age.

“Why bother hiding them?  It’s not like people don’t know that you have them.”

She shook her head.

“People don’t like to see the ones that they know.  Usually.”

He snorted. “I wonder why that is. Now that death is a revolving door, I mean.”

“You’re being sarcastic.”

“You think?” He raised his eyebrows at her.

“I said I was sorry about today.”

He laughed at that.  “No, you didn’t, actually.”

“Oh.” She drew her wings a little bit closer around her, combing the feathers with one hand.

“But, you know, anytime you feel like it, Faerie Queen…”

“Don’t call me that.”  She looked at him and she heard the echo in her own voice, the way the words rolled off of her tongue and rang in the empty hallway.  Her wings unfurled around her.  She saw him flinch, but it was too late, and at the back of her mind, the keeper of the dead was restless and waiting and pleased with the use of her power.

“Fuck,” he said.  “Fuck.” He’d clenched his fists until his knuckles turned white.

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”

He glared at her.  “That’s _twice_ today.”

“I’m sorry.” She looked at the ground. It wasn’t _her_ that wanted to wield her influence over him, but the connection tugged at her power and she wanted to use it, to keep it from decaying.

“Could you be less sorry and a little bit more fucking careful?”

“I’m sorry.”

Dennis shook his head.  “That’s not helping.” He took a breath. “It’s like, I would like to at least preserve the illusion that I have some free will here?  As opposed to being a living ghost?  I know what that badge you wear means, I know you know what it feels like to have your own body puppeted, so could you try to actually be careful?”

She got to her feet, slowly.  “I _am_ trying. It’s not—it’s not natural.”

Her power wanted to be used.  She could feel the keeper of the dead shift somewhere inside of her each time she stretched her limitations.  Its restlessness when she tried to suppress her awareness of his power.  She wasn’t sure how far she could go into that connection. She didn’t want to find out, except for the part of her that did.

It had been worse at the beginning.  The Wardens had supervised the process, chosen their candidate—someone young and resilient, someone recently dead, someone whose power was useful, but not so strong that he couldn’t be dealt with if something when wrong. They were thinking of _her,_ of course, of what one of the passengers might do in a brain that couldn’t hold it back.  The maker had provided a body, the chirurgien and herself, together, had made him what he was before, imprinted his old memories on the new brain. And then it had gone wrong, although not as they’d expected.  She could summon his ghost with her power, she could tie it to the body, but she couldn’t let go.  Not quite. He was bound to stay close to her, and he was suggestible, to commands or to her power.

The connection was weaker, now, but it was still there.

Dennis was looking at her, and she could see the face of the hanged man behind his face. Stony. 

“I’m supposed to go out with Tecton and a couple others tonight.  Everyone else is going to be in civilian clothes.”

“I’ll change, then.”

But if she told the truth, she didn’t like being Ciara very much. She put on jeans and her down coat, tucked her braid into her coat collar, met Dennis in the hallway and drifted behind him until he was walking fifteen yards or so in front of her. He glanced back at her, and there was a shadow of something like gratitude on his face.

His friends were waiting outside, by the corner of the park, breath steaming from below winter hats.  He waved and went to join them, and she followed just a little way behind, close enough that she almost looked like a straggler in their group.

The first fast food places were beginning to open up again, although they were expensive. It was decadent, a piece of the old world, when the Wardens’ Tinkers and Thinkers were still working to find ways to get food to the people in the city’s temporary shelters.  The one they chose had glass windows up front, a yellow sign, and the sidewalk around it was suffused with the smell of hot oil.  Their little group waited for her at the door.

“Are you coming in, Ciara?”  Tecton asked. She knew him, a little.

“I thought I’d wait outside.  I brought a book.”

A girl she didn’t recognize shifted.  Her other sight showed her a body that looked like it was made of mercury, liquid metal molding and remolding itself around her.

“You could get your own table, if you want.  You’d be warmer.”

Ciara smiled. “It’s fine.  I’m not really hungry.”

There was a bench across the street from the restaurant and she sat on it. It was pushing the limits of her radius, just a little bit, with the door closed between them. But that was probably good practice.

It was cold. She reached for the firesinger’s ghost, remembered that she was meant to be in her civilian identity. Instead, she pulled her hood up over her head.  She could see Dennis’s group through the window, heads nodding at someone’s joke. If she concentrated, she thought that she might feel the warmth of the room around him, the smell of grease and toast and ketchup, but that was something that she thought he wouldn’t like her to pay attention to.

She took out her book.  The streetlight over her bench was working, and it gave off enough light that she could read, if dimly. Turning the pages with her gloves was difficult, though, and even with the gloves on, her hands were cold. She thought again of the firesinger. Did she care about her civilian identity?  The crone had given her a new face before and could do so again, if she wanted.

Ciara sighed.

“You look cold.”

A stranger in a heavy coat and hat, with a neatly trimmed dark beard. When a moment passed and she didn’t say anything, he smiled at her.

“Do you mind if I sit down with you?”

“Go ahead.”

He sat.

“You didn’t answer my question.  I said that you look cold.”

She closed her book.  “I didn’t think it was a question.”

He laughed at that, and the laugh showed his teeth, which were prominent and very white. It sounded forced.

“You’re right, it wasn’t.  What’s your name?”

“Ciara.”

“And don’t you have a place to stay, Ciara?  It’s a little bit dark and cold for a young girl like you to be out on her own.” He was leaning in towards her just a little, so that she could hear the slight wheeze in his breath.

“I believe you’ve misunderstood,” she told him, and she let her voice be the fey voice, the voice that turned heads.  A hundred echoes speaking with her.  “I am well-attended wherever I go.”

She beckoned, and a woman’s shape boiled up from the shadows, her skin painted the colors of a tropical bird.

“Põletama, the firesinger.” The ghost put one iridescent hand between hers, and her fingers were warm.  “But you haven’t told me your name.”

Her guest, when she looked as him, was sitting stiffly, pointedly avoiding the ghost’s gaze. And hers.

“Valkyrie.” The little wheeze in his breath was stronger now.  “Excuse me. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

She smiled, brilliantly.  “I’m not offended. You may go, if you want.”

He fled.

Põletama had been one of the ones that she’d killed.  She remembered that, as the ghost draped an arm over her shoulders. Her spirit was quick-moving, a work of art, but when it had come to the end she’d cried and stumbled and cast her power in all directions, in vain.

She tried to imagine the ghost next to her as flesh and blood.  She didn’t know if she could sit out this interminable period of waiting again.  If she got as far as the ones that she’d killed.  She could imagine them waking, unfree, cursing her.  Bound to their murderer for as long as it took for the shard to knit itself back into a body and make them whole.

She touched the firesinger’s hair.  Part of her hoped that she wouldn’t get that far.

She wondered what she would say to Doctor Yamada, in their weekly meeting. That she’d tossed aside her pretense at humanity because her hands were cold and a stranger was annoying her? They’d discuss what it meant to be human, maybe.  She wouldn’t mention how Põletama had died, or the way such memories were becoming clearer and clearer in her mind, the more time she spent near _him_.

She was reading again when Dennis came out, Põletama standing behind her. She saw his silhouette against the light from the window and folded down the page to mark her place. She was surprised when he crossed the street towards her.

“Hey.” He thrust a styrofoam cup under her nose.  She looked at him.

“Well, take it,” he said.  “It’s hot chocolate. I figured it was kind of cold for a milkshake.”

He was holding a bag in his other hand, and now he dropped it in her lap.

“French fries.”

“Thanks.” She took the cup, sipped. His friends were walking in a group, about to turn the corner.  “You don’t want to catch them up?”

He shook his head.

“I can wait.”

They sat in silence.  She ate a French fry. They were hot enough to burn the roof of her mouth, and they left her fingers greasy.  She could see him eyeing the ghost that stood behind her, on guard.

“Do you remember being dead?” she asked after a while.

He looked at her sidelong, blowing on his gloveless hands.

“Nope. I died, I woke up. Nothing in between.”

She nodded and sipped the hot chocolate.  It was steaming and much too sweet, and she liked it.

“Can I ask why you’re suddenly interested?”  His features were sharp under the hazy light of the streetlamp, fox-like, and she could see the implacable face of his ghost with her other sight.

She shrugged.

“Actually, I think that’s practically the first time you’ve asked me a question about myself that wasn’t, ‘Are you done changing, Clockblocker?’ Or, ‘Are you ready to go fight the bad guys, Clockblocker?’”  He pitched his voice an octave higher when he was saying her lines, miming the gestures of an evil queen.  “Except I’ve noticed you don’t use that name.”

“Sorry,” she said.

“Okay, this line I recognize.”

“What do you want me to say?”  She could hear the frustration in her own voice, and there was that prickling, in the back of her head, the knowledge that she could make him be quiet, if she wanted to.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing is the right thing. It’s just weird, being metaphysically attached to a parahuman ex-serial killer.  It’s not exactly what I expected would happen after I died.”

She was shredding the empty bag of French fries into long strips.  When she looked up, she found that he was staring at her.

“Seriously?” he said.  “Faerie Queen is offensive, but serial killer is just fine?”

She swallowed.  “It’s accurate. I guess.”

“Yeah.” He let the silence stretch. She dismissed Põletama with a wave of her hand, and the ghost dissolved into the dark space where her warriors waited when they weren’t at her side.

“I have to…keep reminding myself that you’re human.  I know that sounds bad.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured that out.”  His voice was dry, sarcastic, and she winced a little.  She could see the way the muscles were working in his jaw.

“I think it helps, if we talk.”  She paused. “But I would understand if you didn’t want to.”

He smiled, and the smile didn’t reach his eyes, which were the hanged man’s calm, dark, patient eyes in her sight, but he’d relaxed a little on the bench, and his hands were folded loosely in his lap, and he looked like he was _trying_ to look comfortable around her. It was close enough.

“I was going to say that I appreciate you waiting.  Giving me space.”

“Sure.”

He frowned, running a hand over his face as if he could feel the places where it was lichen and stone in her other vision.

“I’m not—I’m not saying that we can be friends or anything, but I wouldn’t mind trying a little bit.  Since we’re stuck with each other.”

“For now,” Ciara said.

“Yeah. For now.” He shrugged. “It’s weird.  Even I can’t always tell how much of me is me, and how much is the passenger.  It’s like I walked into my old house to find the furniture arranged differently. Everything’s still there, but the overall picture’s changed, and I’m different. I keep waiting for people to notice.”

“I know that feeling.”

“Do you?”  His smile was a little bit cold, tentative somehow, his lips pressed together as if he was holding back some other thought. He was mocking her, maybe, but if she held her breath and let it out slowly it felt almost good to be mocked. To know that he would disagree with her, if she said the wrong thing.

“I think I do,” she said.  “But I guess I can’t know.”

“No.” He jumped off the bench, stretched. “I’m going back to HQ. Are you going to walk with me?”

She shook her head.

“I’ll follow behind.”

She watched him walk away from her, and when she closed her eyes she found her spirits waiting for her, in the place where they were always waiting. They weren’t clamoring for life, but they pressed at her consciousness, sharing their powers and their deaths. They were patient, and they would wait in silence until she called them into the world again.

She opened her eyes and saw the glimmer of Dennis’s hair under a streetlight. She measured the distance between them. Fifteen yards, then twenty. She could feel how easy it would be, to reel him back to her.  But she let out her breath, and she pushed down the keeper of the dead, and she tried, with all her might, to let him go.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Mook91 on SB, who wrote the prompt that inspired this.


End file.
